A key benefit of virtualization is the ability to move active virtual machines (VMs) among data center servers. However, when moving active VMs between servers, it is important to ensure that the VM's network connectivity will be maintained after the move to the destination server. One way to maintain connectivity is to keep the VM within the origin subnet. However, this limitation reduces the set of potential destinations to only those servers that are connected to the original subnet via layer 2 connectivity. One solution to this situation is to deploy a virtual extensible local area network (VXLAN) solution to enable a layer-2 overlay network between virtual machines over a layer-3 network. VXLAN encapsulates network traffic of virtualized workloads in standard IP packets. As a result, multiple VXLAN virtual networks can run over the same physical infrastructure.
However, manually configuring and maintaining VXLAN networks can become complex, particularly for large data centers that contain a large number of network forwarding elements. The difficulty becomes compounded as the complexity of the physical topology of the network increases. For example, the physical topology may include link aggregated network elements. Link aggregation applies to various methods of combining or aggregating multiple network connections in parallel in order to increase throughput to a network device beyond what a single connection could sustain. The configuration and management of link-aggregated devices prevent several configuration challenges. The manual configuration of link aggregation in combination with VXLAN configuration can be error prone and difficult to manage.